To date a number of systems for detecting changes in human posture have been proposed which consist of taking pictures of a human body or parts of it with a CCD (solid-state imaging elements) camera, and of analyzing human posture or parts of it based on image signals (electric signals) delivered from the CCD camera.
With such human posture detecting systems, image signals from the CCD camera are processed by a signal processing system (computer), whereby the posture of the human body or its parts is analyzed and identified.
Such human posture detecting system has such a constitution that the identified posture of human body or its parts can be compared with reference postures stored in a memory. With such constitution, the system can be utilized for a game machine or a posture evaluating system.
For example, with such human posture detecting system, necessary data regarding a plurality of reference postures are read out from a memory, and displayed on a monitor one after another, so that, each time a reference posture appears on the monitor, it is compared with the posture of a human body or its part reproduced from the image signals delivered from the CCD camera, then whether or not the reproduced posture coincides with the reference posture is determined, and the number of coincidences is counted for determining the winner in a game, or the count itself serves as a score(mark).
With said posture detecting system, however, information the image signal carries is so huge in amount that, even though a high performance system is used for processing the image signal, it requires a long time for processing such a vast amount of information.
Accordingly, with this type of posture detecting system, it takes so much time to determine whether or not the reproduced posture of a human body or its parts coincides with a given reference posture, that comparison of the reproduced posture with a plurality of reference postures delivered rapidly one after another to determine the identity of the reproduced posture is practically impossible. In short, it is practically very difficult for this type of posture detecting system to be used as an element, as said earlier, of a game machine, or as a posture evaluating system.